This invention relates to a transport apparatus of the type in which a block of a plurality of flat articles, aligned uprightly and juxtaposed laterally, is transported by air flow through a transport pipeline.
Conventionally, this type of transport apparatus has already been known wherein articles are transported by air flow through a pipeline. Advantageous convenience of the transport apparatus has been highly evaluated because articles can be tranported from a stockroom to a utilization place in a workshop, without disturbing the outer workings and requiring any surplus space.
The conventional transport apparatus utilizing the air flow, however, fails to transport flat, thin articles such as a vessel for storage of various goods and a cover or lid of the vessel. In general, these flat articles are accommodated in a container for their storage in the stockroom. Typically, when accommodating these flat articles in the container, a number of flat articles are respectively aligned uprightly and juxtaposed laterally to form an elongated block of the flat articles. A plurality of such blocks, each extending laterally, are loaded into the container in row and column pattern. However, if the thus loaded block is directly taken out of the container so as to be set into a loading station of the transport pipeline, the respective flat articles cannot stand by themselves but fall down, and the block collapses. A similar phenomenon occurs at an unloading station. Therefore, the conventional transport apparatus cannot transport the flat articles.
For these reasons, it has been the practice to transport the container per se accommodating the flat articles from the stockroom to the utilization place, resulting in disadvantages that the other workings are disturbed and a surplus space is required for storage and transport of the container.